


Five-or-Six-Something

by Gabri



Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies), Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: I have a lot of feelings about height differences, M/M, One Shot, Viking Jack, idk it's hard growing to six feet when someone fell in love with you at five feet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-04 00:45:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2903123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gabri/pseuds/Gabri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hiccup is taller, but they're both adjusting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five-or-Six-Something

It’s summer when Hiccup starts growing. And growing. And Jack’s been growing too, but it’s most apparent in the set of his shoulders and the width of his arms. Hiccup doesn’t age like the other Vikings, apparently - he’s a human weed, long and lean and unstoppable.

It’s first noticeable when when they kiss. Jack used to lean down before. For a while he still does - he just misses a whole lot more, getting Hiccup’s chin instead of his mouth or bumping their foreheads together accidentally. After the twenty-third mishap, Hiccup starts taking his face in his hands to guide him instead.

He thought it would be exciting to rediscover a person like that, so the twinge of sadness comes as a surprise. Hiccup never brings up the change in angle, and Jack feels instead like he’s lost his ability to make his boyfriend’s knees go weak. He used to wind his arms around Jack’s neck, clinging when they kissed. Now they just kind of hang at his sides like they’re not sure where they’re supposed to go.

One afternoon the dragon-rider fashions himself up a handsome set of dark green leggings. Two months later he’s picking the stitches apart because his ankle has already started to stick out of the bottom. The next pair he makes a little longer, planning ahead, but barely a week goes by before he’s tripping over them on a daily basis, forgetting to fold up the extra fabric. Soon enough Jack’s watching him hem the seams with his tongue between his teeth and an irritated spark lingering in his eyes.

There’s changes to the prosthetic, of course, but Hiccup adjusts that so much anyway that it’s like a drop in the ocean comparatively. If anything there’s more stumbling in between, with the unintended effect of making him look even _more_ graceful when perched on Toothless’s back, and twice as awkward when he’s trekking around Berk alone.

He starts taking measurements to calculate how to match the growth in his foot to its counterpart, which in turn means that the walls of his workshop are now littered with horizontal notches. Jack even catches him a few times, pressing himself flat by the doorframe and marking just above his head with a piece of charcoal. Once he knows that’s what lines actually represent, he can’t help but marvel at how far apart the most recent additions have become.

By winter, when it seems at last he’s stopped growing, Hiccup’s got about three inches of height on his boyfriend. It’s not much, but for a scrawny child who used to be half a foot shorter, but it changes everything.

For Hiccup, it even changes how he is alone. He gets a habit of walking with his head down, slouching like he’s not sure what to do with the rest of his body. He’s grown so used to slipping under elbows and being the one head everyone forgets to count in a crowd that the first time he finds himself standing in the spotlight within the teenager riders, he actually sinks down a little before remembering to be proud.

For Jack, it means everything they share is placed a little higher. When Hiccup borrows his pencil to scrawl down a note, he sets it thoughtlessly on the shelf above it’s original home. Jack spends a few minutes stalling, drawing over his runes to make them perfect, until Hiccup takes notice and plucks it back down again, smiling in that way he does when he wants to ask a question but he already knows the answer isn’t going to be simple.

The arm wrestle once. It’s Snotlout’s idea, a bit of friendly competition between the ever-growing circle of friends. Hiccup cheats his way through the line, hiding his skinny arms beneath padded armor and throwing his opponents strength off with witty questions or even the few daring compliments. Astrid beats him, of course - she’s never one to fall for the games, but for everyone else it works like a charm. Even Snotlout lets his guard down when Hiccup bluffs something about a girl watching him from afar.

By the time it’s Jack’s turn, he’s more than prepared. And when Hiccup’s knuckles make their inevitable slam against the table, they break instantly into a shouting match.

Jack insists he’s getting ahead of himself, while Hiccup makes a long, babbling speech about training the body and unfair bias and the difference between spending every morning burying double-sided axes into wood and spending it on the back of a dragon, and how if they were ‘ _leg wrestling_ ’ it would be a different story.

He spends the next few minutes with his head in his hands, refusing to meet Jack’s eyes and trying his hardest to block out the way that Astrid’s cackling into her mug a few chairs over.

A few nights later, in Hiccup’s workshop with the doors all blockaded as a silent agreement, they give the leg wrestling a try. Hiccup pins him down with his knees, straddles him in that easy way he straddles a dragon, and then surprises them both by meeting Jack’s erection with a downward grind of his hips. Turns out, he’s got a point about leg strength: all those morning flights mean he can ride Jack until he’s seeing stars and still have the stamina to suggest another round after.

They sleep curled up into each other. In the morning, Jack rolls on top of him and stretches out, yawning loudly, and Hiccup meets him with a snorting giggle and a half-hearted push of hands.

His breath catches when they embrace. Another new discovery - the height difference goes away entirely when they’re horizontal.

"You don’t _mind_ , do you?” Hiccup says when they break apart, and he doesn’t elaborate any further but they both know what he means. Jack slides a hand up his thigh, disbelieving. There’s white lines just above his hip, stretch marks from over the past summer.

" _Gods_ , no. You’re, uh…"

Hiccup smiles nervously.

"…you’re beautiful." he finishes, because he’s too tired to manage anything more elegant than that. And because, well, it’s true.

It’s funny what those words can do to him when the armor is stripped off and there’s no padding left to fill out his shoulders. Hiccup stretches like a cat, all long legs and curling toes, smiling lopsidedly like he’s considering the pros and cons of taking the compliment to heart. He slips out of bed with a bounce on his step, plucking up their shed clothes from where they left them strewn across the floor.

When they kiss again, standing, Jack leans up eagerly to meet him, and Hiccup loops his arms comfortably around his neck and clings.


End file.
